Colin Charles Agenda

Pages. They are becoming very popular. If you’re a brand, you’ve got to keep track of these things. This is sort of a dump of my thoughts on this.

It was quite common in the day to get a Twitter page. Multiple people can update a Twitter page. There are tools for this, and Twitter has an API. You have desktop tools for this as well.

Facebook pages are common if you have a product or business. The more like’s you get, the higher chance of getting your message spread on the newsfeed. Facebook has an API, and there are tools for this. Multiple people can manage the account.

LinkedIn pages exist. The target audience is a little different. There doesn’t seem to be an API or apps surrounding it, so you end up using the web-based interface. It seems to be the least popular.

Google+ just launched pages. The target audience currently seem to be the alpha geeks. It doesn’t have limitations like Twitter, and I see people posting more long-form status updates that resemble blog postings. It has no API (yet?). It has no multiple user management (yet?). And you have to build a crowd amongst circles, because its still relatively new.

We’re told to be present on all social networks. If you’re a brand, you’d be silly not to be where your audience is. My question is, with all these social networks how do you focus?

Don’t forget, you have to manage your website. American brands are now just pointing to a Facebook page in ads (fb.com/brandname) which is fine, but its something you don’t control. Your website is something you fully control. Your blog is something you fully control. I see things like Clojure Notes and wonder the permanency of something like this.

Facebook looks to be trailblazing and seems like its going to be around for a long time. Your content will live for as long as Facebook lives. Twitter is all temporal content, you forget you even have archives. LinkedIn I have no idea, but there’s always the emails it sends out. Google+ is something that worries me — they’ve killed Buzz, Wave, Orkut, etc. and while you can take your content and run with it, you lose links.

Some people don’t care about continuity of content. I generally do.

Short names. Facebook and Twitter support this. Google+ has something ridiculous in terms of a number.

I read somewhere that the average human can keep track of at most three social networks. I can’t find a reference to this, and I know its not Dunbar’s number.

Walled gardens. If you have a Google+ album, you can’t link to an individual picture. Facebook pages and what is attached to it is not searchable via a search engine. You generally duplicate updates on sites just to keep up with these walled gardens of Web 2.0.

Bottom line: we’re all looking to engage. We all want a large audience. We all want to get the message across. But how much time are we spending on this? When do we get all the tools we need to manage all this “at one go”? Where do we put our eggs in for 2012?

Got an interesting email today announcing the Domain Registry’s Sensitive Name policy. This affects all *.my registrations. What is it defined as?

A Sensitive Name is a Domain Name which contains word or words in English, Malay and romanized Chinese (including dialects) and Indian dialects, which:

• are sensitive to the Malaysian public;
• are obscene, scandalous, indecent, offensive or contrary to Malaysian public norms or policy;
• comprise of derivatives and colloquialisms of words that are offensive; and/or
• consist of pejorative expressions in terms of denotation, connotation or association.

So no derogatory terms (yorais.my can probably be contested — so yorais.com makes more sense for example), no racial or ethnic slurs (so ahlian.my might be an issue but ahlian.com is generally ok), no religious slurs, no sexual remarks (pen15.my not good? :P), no undesirable reference towards culture/society/community (lazyfoo.my versus lazyfoo.com), and no vulgar or crude expressions that refer to the anatomy, bodily function, body-by-products and gender.

That is quite all encompassing. For arbitration, the Kuala Lumpur Regional Centre for Arbitration (KLRCA) has been appointed to administer complaints.

Do I like this? No, not really, as I’ve been a big proponent of .my domain space. However if you’re thinking of registering a new domain name that may be politically related, I suggest picking something from a more sensible domain registra (so a .com/.net/.org). You’ll get more latitude, with a lot less chance of it going up against arbitration and deletion.

<tl;dr>Video is going to be big. Apps that have video in them are going to be awesome. Multimedia on your iPad/tablet device is where it’s at for learning. Read on for 3 trends that I’ve noticed.</tl;dr>

John Gruber today said on the Bloomberg TV+ for the iPad:

This is the future of TV. The full Bloomberg news channel, free of charge, on your iPad. Apps are the new channels.

I remembered reading a couple of days back, Mark Suster talking about how he invested in TreeHouse (formerly known as Think Vitamin). Think Vitamin gives you high quality video training to keep you on the cutting edge of web development. It is a curated Udemy. They both have their space – I’d like to see it like TV programming versus YouTube programming.

Some takeaway from Mark Suster’s post: American’s watch 5.3 hours of television per day! Americans read less than an hour a day!!!

Learning by video is useful. Smarter universities are opensourcing their classes — not only the slides and notes, but they’re also putting audio & video online too. Some more progressive ones are even allowing you to take part in the class via an online enrollment, completely free (see Stanford’s Introduction to Databases).

It seems that Jason Calacanis has pivoted Mahalo yet again. After some layoffs, the company is pivoting from videos to apps. The blame seems to lie on Google’s Panda updates in where highly optimized SEO sites get hit. YouTube’s affiliate fees are probably not paying the bills.

So the pivot is to make instructional apps for the iPad that not only incorporate video, but some text of the techniques behind it. See apps like Learn Guitar, Learn Pilates, How to Draw!, and Walkthrough for Angry Birds. All the apps cost USD$9.99 with the exception of the Angry Birds walkthrough.

Why will this pivot work? Because instead of the web browser and search being the medium, you’re letting the App Store be the search engine. The web browser is now the app. The videos are already made, existing in Mahalo’s bank. You can download the videos if need be (I bet they are huge). And you’re bound to find it more useful to consume on your iPad rather than on your computer screen or TV.

There are many how-to books like The Complete Idiots Guide, et al. They sell for about USD$20-30 a pop. Why not get access to videos? Read text. Learn by doing with multimedia. This was the promise of Microsoft Encarta for example.

Instructional videos are very popular. I know friends in their 20s learning how to cook or even apply make-up techniques via YouTube videos. I also know people realizing that the iPad is very handy to be reading/watching videos while on the lounge, lying in bed, etc. Its also a lot easier to prop an iPad up to learn how to play the guitar than it is to bring your laptop there. Touch will allow easier pausing/skipping/etc. compared to a remote control.

The trend seems to be that of videos. We learn by seeing.

I was in Berlin recently, and visited the Topography of Terror. I read about this and the events that are explained there for O Level History. I felt connected by seeing pictures, reading additional texts, and more. Imagine the future of education: I deep-dive into a subject like this, and I can skim things a lot easier with multimedia available to me. I’ll understand a lot better & quicker than just reading pages and pages of fairly boring text.

So, are apps the new channels? I think Gruber is on to something. As are Suster and Calacanis.

Its been traditional since the old days to stick receipts on a sheet of paper and have them represent entries into an expense report. I think the only time this differed was at Sun – there we just stuffed it all into an envelope without any order and someone presumably went through all of them and figured out their own sane order.

Recently I had to scan about 70 pages worth of receipts (yes, imagine the expense value). My scanner creates some rather huge images (at 300dpi, with some 4128×2480 pixels), which average anywhere between 3-12MB per page for one JPG image. The scans to PDFs don’t make sense because I can’t concatenate PDFs the way I can JPG images (and the sheet feeder only handles about 15 or so sheets at once, reliably — its very easy to get paper jams when you have staples and loose paper).

Total size for everything? 300MB. A little hard to attach to an email. So I whipped out trusty ImageMagick (easily installable on MacOSX via homebrew — brew install imagemagick). ImageMagick wouldn’t install due to a conflict with pkg-config from Mono, and since I don’t use Mono any longer I trashed that.

Then it was as simple as:

ls -1 *.jpg | sed "s/\(.*\)\.jpg/\1.jpg \1_thumb.jpg/" | xargs -n 2 convert -resize 1024 -quality 70

What does that do? It simply finds all JPG files, then it saves thumbnails with a _thumb, and it uses convert (from ImageMagick) to resize it to 1024 pixels with only about 70% quality. This reduced the 300MB tome to something like 10MB!

How do I generate PDFs? Simply open all the thumbnails (open -a Preview *_thumb.jpg) and then do a Print to PDF from Preview.

Voila, all expense receipts are generated and ready for emailing. I typically like to keep attachments below 20MB in size because most mail systems reject it after that.

I travel a lot and one of the things I do when I visit a city is find a postcard, grab a stamp, and get writing to send Sara a postcard from abroad. All this does take time, effort, sometimes the card doesn’t arrive, etc. I’ve been wondering when I could just take a photo on my iPhone and have that mailed to her instead.

On my iPhone there is a folder called Postcards with apps like: Popcarte, Holiday Card, SnapShot Postcard, postcard by concierge.com (this is a Conde Nast app), postagram. Some of these send physical cards for a buck or so, and some just send them via email. I’ve spent some time studying if this idea is viable and I’ve always thought that local printing makes sense. Stamps might be important too…

Apple just killed them all with Cards. Printed on cotton paper, and will cost USD$2.99 within the USA and USD$4.99 for the rest of the world. All billed to your AppStore/iTunes account. So no mucking with creating a new account, getting your credit card, etc.

The idea is brilliant. The camera in the iPhone is awesome. I take more photos with it now than any other camera. And the phone is always with me.

So there, Apple’s new iOS 5 killed a bunch of apps (cue… RIP October 12 2011). And I’m glad I didn’t hack on this idea. Guess the local stamps go the way of the dodo, and I might embrace spending five bucks the next time I’m somewhere. Now to guarantee the cards actually arrive…

I’ve been a paying Github customer for quite some time. I like having private repositories. I didn’t realise that Bitbucket was purchased by Atlassian, and more interestingly, they’re now offering Git support.

For me, this beats the pants off Github. There might be more community at Github (cue: how Sourceforge is sort of dying), and I’m not ditching Github, but I’m definitely realising I can save money from now on (Github’s cheapest plans start at $7/month for private repos).

So how does Bitbucket compare in terms of pricing? 5 free users for private repositories. Unlimited public/private repositories. If I hit more than 5, the next 5 users cost $2/month each ($10/month for 10 users). Clear win.

Bitbucket also has a migration tool on the Web that allows you to import repositories. It didn’t take much work for me, and I’ve just cancelled my Github subscription. I’m not cancelling my Github account because whatever is public still works… but for private stuff, Bitbucket seems to be the winner.